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When Emily Brontë published “Wuthering Heights,” in 1847, critics were baffled, alarmed, and mostly unimpressed. James Lorimer, writing in the North British Review, promised that the novel would “never be generally read.” Nearly two centuries later, it’s regarded as one of the great works of English literature. In a live taping of Critics at Large at the 92nd Street Y, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss the staying power of the original text and the countless adaptations it’s inspired, from the 1939 film featuring Laurence Olivier to Andrea Arnold’s 2011 version. The most recent attempt comes from the director Emerald Fennell, whose new “Wuthering Heights,” starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, reads as a romantic fever dream. The movie has been polarizing in part for the way it excises some of the weirder and wilder aspects of its source material. But what’s discarded—or emphasized—can also be revealing. “It’s an audacious proposition to adapt a great novel . . . I don’t think it needs to be faithful, necessarily,” Fry says. “The adaptation itself becomes a portrait of the time in which it’s made.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Wuthering Heights,” by Emily Brontë
Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights”
Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” (2026)
“Emerald Fennell’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ Never Plumbs the Depths,” by Justin Chang (The New Yorker)
“Barbie” (2023)
“Saltburn” (2023)
“Promising Young Woman” (2020)
“Jane Eyre,” by Charlotte Brontë
“The Communist Manifesto,” by Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx (1848)
Peter Kosminsky’s “Wuthering Heights” (1992)
William Wyler’s “Wuthering Heights” (1939)
Andrea Arnold’s “Wuthering Heights” (2011)
“All the King’s Men,” by Robert Penn Warren
“I Love L.A.” (2025–)

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

“Hate Radio,” which was recently onstage at St. Ann’s Warehouse, began with a series of quiet, affecting accounts of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda—among them, a story about a young Tutsi woman who saw her sisters’ legs get chopped off by her Hutu neighbor. Videos of these harrowing monologues, prerecorded by actors speaking in French, were projected onto a mysterious opaque box at the center of the performance space, as audience members listened through headphones and read English subtitles. Then venetian blinds shrouding the box slowly rose to reveal glass walls and, inside them, a sinister diorama—a replica of RTLM, or Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines, the radio station that fuelled the catastrophe.

What followed was a seemingly real-time French broadcast from RTLM, which felt as if it were being piped straight into our ears from July, 1994, in streams of transgressive, intoxicating invective laced with dirty jokes, a warped Rwandan-history quiz show, and bouncy pop music, from silky Afrobeat to American rock, including, at one alarming juncture, the song “Rape Me,” by Nirvana. Three shock jocks sat before microphones trading wisecracks; a happily stoned colleague spun records and patched in callers beneath a poster of the nineties icon MC Hammer, bearing the album title “Please Hammer Don’t Hurt ’Em.” The broadcast was rhythmic and insistent, full of propaganda deriding the country’s Tutsi minority as “cockroaches”—hate speech that helped lead to the death of more than eight hundred thousand people. Yet the trio spitting this poison seemed full of joy. When they laughed, it was easy not to laugh along. When they danced, it was harder not to join in—Gen X Brooklynites around me swayed to “Rape Me,” glancing at one another uneasily.

Milo Rau, the Swiss playwright and director who began staging this pungent project back in 2011, and who has toured it worldwide, has made a specialty of examining atrocity onstage. (He has two more projects coming to New York this season, one of which is about the Gisèle Pelicot trial.) In the States, he’s less well known, as is the story of RTLM, which culminated with two of the d.j.s being convicted of war crimes. (The third went on the lam.) Still, everything in that glass box felt instantly recognizable, an analog cousin of the slick disinformation that streams from our phones—a neon slurry of deepfakes and memes scored with the hits, like that sickening viral video from the White House of detained immigrants in shackles, accompanied by “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye.” Deep in my headphones, I flashed back to a day I’d spent watching Alex Jones as he howled like a horned-out id, the Tasmanian devil as a newscaster. He was impossible to ignore, the goal of all theatre.

The d.j.s depicted in “Hate Radio” radiated this sort of charisma: the jaunty Kantano Habimana, wearing a natty suit and riffing about women and weed (played by the Rwandan comedian Diogène Ntarindwa, himself a veteran of the army that ended the genocide); the brooding Valérie Bemeriki (Bwanga Pilipili), her tone gliding eerily between grief, rage, and a schoolteachery warmth; and the strangest participant, Georges Ruggiu (Sébastien Foucault), a white expat from Belgium who moved to Rwanda a year before the genocide. During the few months that RTLM aired, it was the dominant source of news for many listeners, and its power was greatly intensified by its playful air of interactivity: when people called in to snitch on Tutsis, the d.j.s would broadcast the targets’ names and locations, urging listeners to go after them with machetes.

Much of the onstage banter was pure DARVO, the rhetorical technique best summarized as “I’m rubber, you’re glue.” In RTLM’s account, it was the Tutsis who were the genocidal rapists and death-loving Nazis, at once pathetic losers and soul-dead destroyers. “These people are nihilists,” Ruggiu argues. Moments later, Habimana rants that “these are people who need to be exterminated.” The murders themselves come across as side quests in a video game, complete with cheat codes and drug references. “Keep a good eye on the gutters so that no cockroach escapes you,” Habimana warns. “Smoke something and make sure the cockroach comes to a bad end.” When a child calls in, the d.j.s pump him for strategic info and then inquire sweetly about his favorite music. The performance felt both virtuosic and repulsive, a goulash of hype, sloganeering, and calls to violence spiked with in-jokes, shaggy-dog anecdotes, and populist fables, all of it seductive and—in our dangerous era—familiar. You could call it the Weave.

Rau’s play shares some DNA with American plays that interrogate recent history, including “The Laramie Project,” about the murder of Matthew Shepard; Anna Deavere Smith’s one-woman shows from the nineties; and the 2021 play “Is This a Room,” a verbatim staging of the F.B.I.’s interrogation of Reality Winner. In Lucas Hnath’s excellent “Dana H.,” an actress lip-synched to a loopy, distressing recording in which the playwright’s own mother described being kidnapped, a distancing effect that suggested the way trauma can render a true story unbelievable even to the person who went through it. A few days before “Hate Radio,” I saw “Kramer/Fauci,” which took its script from a C-span debate between the act up firebrand Larry Kramer and the public-health official Anthony Fauci in 1993, during the height of the aids epidemic.

Theatre that sticks to the facts can feel like a balm in a world of sketchy “reality” and true-crime slop. Given what I’d read about Rau, an activist provocateur who has described his work as “a truth machine,” I’d expected “Hate Radio” to be a verbatim reënactment, like “Is This a Room.” Rau has often drawn from transcripts of real trials (including that of the Ceaușescus) and also constructed fictional trials (a tribunal for civil-war atrocities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo), treating the courtroom as a stage and the stage as a courtroom—sometimes literally so. His mock tribunal about Congo, which was performed in 2015 with real judges, real witnesses, and a genuine verdict, led to two ministers being dismissed from the government.

In the program for “Hate Radio,” an author’s note clarified that this production wasn’t that type of show. The brutal witness testimonies came from “allegorical, completely fictional” figures—composites based on multiple survivors. The punkish cross-talk of the studio was inspired, in part, by Sonic Youth videos. In other words, “Hate Radio” was a mood piece intended to transmit the broadcast’s emotional impact, not to imitate its literal sound. It wasn’t documentary or journalism; it was more like a séance, a crackly transmission from a lost world.

This type of slippage would ordinarily nag at me. Instead, I found the performance more profound than “Kramer/Fauci,” which stayed close to the C-span transcript. Not that the latter production—at N.Y.U. Skirball, directed by Daniel Fish—was untheatrical. There were dashes of surrealism (roller skates, a chicken suit) and one audaciously weird effect: a machine belched white foam that coated the stage, then melted, like a glittering snowdrift. The gloppy pileup suggested multiple metaphors: pandemics? semen? the mess of history itself? But the bulk of the evening was a simpler recitation of the 1993 debate, including viewer call-ins. Thomas Jay Ryan was a funny, cranky Kramer, Will Brill a shrewd, amiable Fauci. Their intimate sparring reflected vexed, unresolved tensions about science and government. And yet the night didn’t add much to what you’d get from streaming the interview online. Audience members chuckled at Kramer’s legendary spleen; they moaned in response to bigoted callers. It was the phenomenon a college friend calls “hissing at Nazis,” a curse of so much well-intentioned theatre.

“Hate Radio,” in contrast, was too disorienting to hiss at. It aimed to rattle, not soothe: to lock us into our headphones, where we couldn’t escape our thoughts. If the actors didn’t recite the precise words that were spoken back then, that hideous spell that turned listeners against their neighbors, they offered something just as potent—a jolting reminder of how easy it is to go numb when we are being entertained. ♦

During the first Trump Administration, Sinclair, a company that owns almost two hundred local TV stations across the United States, and is known for its conservative bent, instructed its news anchors to recite a near-identical script on air. “The sharing of bias and false news has become all too common on social media, and more alarming, some media outlets publish these same fake stories without checking facts first,” the script went. “Unfortunately, some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control exactly what people think. And this is extremely dangerous to our democracy.” The message was recognizably Trumpian, and the fact that it was repeated verbatim dozens of times itself whiffed of thought control. The news site Deadspin took clips of different anchors intoning the same words and laid them over one another to make a hellish cacophony.

Last summer, Sinclair reportedly attempted to expand its empire, proposing a merger with Tegna, a broadcaster with nearly seventy stations. In the end, though, it was beaten out by a rival, Nexstar, which, in August, announced a deal to acquire Tegna for around six billion dollars. Nexstar was already the biggest station owner in the U.S. by revenue and market reach; if the acquisition went through, it would control more than two hundred and fifty stations across forty-four states and the District of Columbia. In response to a question about the Sinclair episode, Perry Sook, the C.E.O. of Nexstar, insisted that his company doesn’t “dictate content.” The following month, however, Nexstar courted controversy of its own when it refused to air the late-night host Jimmy Kimmel’s show on its ABC affiliates, after Kimmel insinuated, in the opinion of some viewers, that a right-winger may have killed Charlie Kirk. (Sinclair also preëmpted Kimmel on its ABC affiliates.)

Hours before Nexstar pulled the plug, Brendan Carr, the head of the Federal Communications Commission, had implied that stations could face licensing consequences if they let Kimmel’s show air. (“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said, memorably.) He was quick to thank Nexstar for doing “the right thing,” and has since openly endorsed its bid for Tegna, even though the F.C.C.’s review of the deal is ongoing. So, too, has Donald Trump. “We need more competition against THE ENEMY, the Fake News National TV Networks,” he wrote, earlier this month, on Truth Social. “GET THAT DEAL DONE!”

Many progressives, unsurprisingly, have opposed the Nexstar deal. And yet scorn has not broken cleanly along partisan lines. The pro-Trump networks One America News and Newsmax have both come out against the deal; the latter’s C.E.O., Chris Ruddy, has been perhaps its most visible critic, arguing, somewhat convincingly, that big TV companies being allowed to get bigger is an existential threat to independent outlets like his own. (Ruddy has said that NewsNation, a cable network that is owned by Nexstar, has already won more favorable terms from distributors, despite having worse ratings.) Speaking at a congressional hearing days after the Trump endorsement, Ruddy suggested that the President had been poorly advised and didn’t fully understand the matter. The politics of the issue are further scrambled when you consider that Trump at first appeared to side with Ruddy, with whom he is friendly, before U-turning.

At the heart of all this jockeying is an obscure law that prevents owners of local stations from reaching more than thirty-nine per cent of households nationwide, across all their properties. (Indeed, Trump’s initial stance centered not on the Nexstar deal but on maintaining this cap.) The way the cap is calculated isn’t straightforward, but by any measure, a combined Nexstar and Tegna would blitz through it, meaning that the cap would need to be waived, raised, or abolished for their merger to pass. Critics see the cap as a relic of a bygone age—it has its roots in the New Deal era—and an unfair handicap for companies that must nowadays compete for ad dollars with tech and entertainment behemoths. Supporters of the cap argue, variously, that companies like Nexstar are doing just fine financially, and that allowing them to grow further would be bad not only for the diversity of viewpoints on local TV—the Orwellian Sinclair video again springs to mind—but for consumer prices and journalism jobs. (Addressing Congress, Ruddy claimed that if the price of milk increased at the same rate as the fees that station owners charge TV providers, a gallon would now cost sixty-nine dollars.) Carr has suggested repeatedly that green-lighting deals like Nexstar’s would weaken the grip of New York and Hollywood liberals over TV in the heartland. Ruddy has argued the exact opposite.

The Nexstar-Tegna story is politically messy and technical, and the deal itself isn’t that big in dollars and cents. Evan Swarztrauber, a tech-policy consultant who supports lifting the ownership cap, and who advised Carr when he was an F.C.C. commissioner during Trump’s first term, pointed out to me that the valuation of the entire merger is roughly that of the breakup fee in Netflix’s proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. And yet, the Nexstar deal, which is comparatively under the radar, speaks to many of the same issues—from the competitiveness of traditional media companies in a world of streaming and podcasts to the shifting antitrust posture of Trump’s regulators—and more besides. The conservative Washington Examiner has rightly described the ownership-cap debate as “one of the most consequential and least understood regulatory decisions” of this moment.

Viewed another way, the deal is the latest installment in the ongoing, if asymmetric, power struggle between the executive and legislative branches. (Many proponents of waiving the ownership cap believe that the F.C.C. can do so unilaterally; many critics insist that this would be illegal without congressional approval.) The fight over the deal also represents a fresh iteration of a related trend that I wrote about last year: the tangle of small- and big-government philosophies driving the second Trump Administration, and the coalitional tensions they seem to reflect. (After Ruddy claimed that Ronald Reagan would have supported his case, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board accused him of “taking the Gipper’s name in vain.”) The cost-cutting zeal of DOGE may now feel like a distant nightmare, but deregulatory and regulatory impulses continue to coexist, not least at the F.C.C. If Nexstar, Sinclair, and their ilk may be poised to benefit from the former, networks that the Administration likes a whole lot less are already feeling the heat of the latter. And, in fact, the deployment of both, simultaneously, might not be a contradiction at all.

The congressional hearing at which Ruddy recently spoke was not your typical partisan food fight. Ted Cruz, who chairs the Senate Commerce Committee, and who won headlines last year for likening Carr’s comments about Kimmel to the language of a Mob boss, sounded distinctly unimpressed by the idea that the F.C.C. could simply override the will of Congress to change the ownership cap. But otherwise, he didn’t take an overt position on the merits of such a change; Steven Waldman, the founder of the media-policy group Rebuild Local News, who also testified, told me that Cruz’s opening remarks—in which he traced the history of broadcast media from “I Love Lucy” through our modern era of media fragmentation—were “almost journalistic” in their evenhandedness. Most of Cruz’s Democratic colleagues were nuanced, too. In Waldman’s testimony, he said that he sympathized, to an extent, with both proponents and critics of raising the cap—even if evidence shows that corporate mergers certainly do not guarantee greater investment in local journalism, as industry lobbyists have suggested.

At one point, Waldman had a strikingly friendly exchange with Todd Young, a Republican senator from Indiana. Young’s statement “was among the most eloquent things I’ve heard recently on the importance of community media,” Waldman told me, adding that, in his experience, Republican politicians often have “a real sense for not just the accountability aspects of journalism but the community-cohesion aspects.” This mirrored another trend that I wrote about last year—of Republican lawmakers in certain states quietly pushing bills to help revive flagging local outlets, beneath the fray of their party’s national-level war on the mainstream media. Efforts to reinvigorate local journalism are often focussed on print media, but local TV news is more widely consumed—and generally more trusted than its national counterparts. (A surprising number of local-news anchors have used that trust as a springboard to launch political careers.)

Swarztrauber claims that Carr, too, values local news. “There are people right now arguing that we should just shut down all broadcasters and sell their spectrum to wireless carriers,” he told me. “Carr’s not talking about that. He’s saying that there’s a public good here.” Certainly Carr has long talked about deregulating the airwaves, including in a chapter that he wrote for Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s infamous blueprint for a second Trump term, in which he advocated “eliminating many of the heavy-handed FCC regulations that were adopted in an era when every technology operated in a silo” and “creating a market-friendly regulatory environment.” (Swarztrauber recalled a trip Carr took to visit a radio station in Wyoming “that was a Dell laptop essentially playing music,” and yet couldn’t merge with a local news outlet owing to ownership rules.) After Trump returned to office, the F.C.C. invited comment on all agency regulations as part of an initiative titled “In re: Delete, Delete, Delete.” Last week, I tuned in to the agency’s monthly open meeting, and the agenda sounded conventional, technical (“Proposing Application Limit in Upcoming NCE Reserved Band FM Translator Filing Window,” anyone?), and, at least to my untrained ear, dull.

Carr’s most attention-grabbing maneuvers, however, have been anything but. Since taking over the F.C.C., he has revived and reinterpreted regulations, or weaponized the threat thereof, in ways that have bent the arc of broadcast TV toward Trump, or sought to—not least in the Kimmel case. At a glance, then, his approach appears to be inconsistent. But a coherent project comes into view if you see his primary currency as leverage, over beneficiaries and targets alike. Craig Aaron, the co-C.E.O. of Free Press, a media-advocacy group that strongly opposes lifting the ownership cap, told me that the divergent strands of Carr’s approach are best understood “less as a contradiction and more as a merger.” The F.C.C. did not respond to my e-mail inviting Carr to comment, but he has described ending the ownership cap not only in free-market terms but as a means to “empower” smaller competitors to stand up to the major networks whose programming they carry, such that next time, perhaps, they have the leverage to keep a Kimmel off air permanently. (In the fall, Nexstar and Sinclair ended up reinstating his show, following talks with Disney, which owns ABC.) More overtly, Carr told the Times Magazine that a “realignment” is under way in how right-wingers conceive of using government power to achieve their objectives. “Conservatives have complained about media bias forever,” he said. “We’ve always relied on the idea that the free market would address it.” But “this sort of libertarian free-market answer isn’t working.”

If, as Aaron puts it, the “macro” explanation for the enduring importance of traditional broadcast TV is that lots of people still watch it, then the “micro” explanation is that one particular person still watches: Donald Trump. The President, of course, has taken aim at hostile late-night hosts—Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, of CBS, and Seth Meyers, of NBC—and called for major networks to have their licenses stripped. This is not exactly in Carr’s gift. But he does have other tools. One of those is an “equal time” rule which, like the TV-ownership cap, predates our current era of informational super-abundance. The rule holds that, under certain conditions, networks who host a political candidate for office must offer similar opportunities to their opponents. News programs have generally been exempt from this requirement, and in 2006 the F.C.C. extended the exemption to a late-night interview that Jay Leno conducted with Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor of California. Late-night shows have apparently assumed themselves to be exempt ever since. But, in January, the F.C.C. put them on notice. “If you’re fake news,” Carr warned, at a press conference, “you’re not going to qualify.” He later confirmed that his agency has opened an “enforcement action” involving ABC, after “The View” aired an interview with James Talarico, a Democratic Senate candidate in Texas. (Carr has said that the rules apply to all broadcasters, but talk radio, a conservative-dominated medium, doesn’t appear to be in his crosshairs.)

Last week, Colbert claimed on his show that lawyers at Paramount Skydance, the owner of CBS, which has bowed to pressure from Trump and Carr before—and, as it happens, is trying to derail Netflix’s takeover of Warner Bros. with a bid that would require the Administration’s approval—blocked him from airing an interview with Talarico, for fear of triggering an equal-time review. CBS countered that it had not made a prohibition but merely offered advice, inciting a furious on-air rebuttal from Colbert, which ended with him scooping a printout of the network’s statement into a dog-poop bag. Colbert likened Carr to a “smug bowling pin” and mocked him for telling comedians to go do a streaming show or podcast if they want to get around F.C.C. rules. (“Great idea, man whose job is to regulate broadcast TV,” Colbert quipped. “It’s like when Arby’s changed their slogan to ‘Arby’s: Would it kill you to eat a salad?’ ”) At a press conference, Carr hit back that Talarico was peddling a “hoax,” and suggested that Colbert was bitter about his time in the “limelight” coming to an end. Colbert’s CBS show will indeed end, in May—a decision that itself has been seen as an act of supplication to Trump. (CBS has cited financial reasons.)

Carr’s jibe struck me as weirdly TV-centric, in a very Trumpian sense. There is now a vast media world beyond broadcast—as the foundational premise of the push to raise the TV-ownership cap reflects—and I suspect Colbert will easily find his place within it; last week, he followed Carr’s advice and uploaded his non-televised interview with Talarico to YouTube, where it racked up millions of views. (The video, and its attendant controversy, also got Talarico a fund-raising boost.) Various observers suggested that Colbert and Talarico had benefitted from the Streisand effect, in which attempts to censor information often only amplify it. Swarztrauber told me that both men “got out of this situation what they wanted.”

Not that this means Carr lost—I think CBS gave him what he wanted, too. The controversy unfolding made for “one of the most fun days I’ve had on the job,” he said. Talarico suggested that he had been censored directly by the government, which Carr compared to “that meme where someone with a bicycle takes a stick and pokes it through their own front wheel, and they end up crashing, and then they cry for help.” Carr accused journalists of falling for the charade. “Watching the arc of this story, it was so clear where it was gonna go,” he said. “It’s why so many people don’t trust the fake-news media anymore.” ♦

Sometime around 1860, Spaniards attacked a Navajo settlement in New Mexico and captured a woman named Ated-bah-Hohzoni, meaning “happy girl.” As she hid behind a cliff with her one-year-old daughter, she watched them shoot and kill her father, her husband, and her two young sons. Then they came for her and her daughter. The Spaniards marched them to Taos, where they were sold into slavery. Father Antonio José Martínez, a well-known priest and civic leader in the New Mexico Territory, purchased the mother for a hundred and fifty pesos. He changed her name to Rosario, by which she was known for the rest of her life. Another family in Taos purchased her daughter, whom they called Soledad, which translates as “solitude.”

More than a century later, Dora Ortiz Vásquez, a great-granddaughter of Martínez, published a booklet about Rosario, based on the stories that her mother and Rosario herself had told her when she was a girl. Titled “Enchanted Temples of Taos,” it gives a fawning account of her famous great-grandfather and his unwavering benevolence, including in his treatment of Rosario. When Vásquez first mentions Rosario, she calls her Martínez’s “young Navajo slave” and his “most outstanding” maidservant. We don’t learn anything about Rosario’s life before her captivity, but, after she arrived in Taos, Vásquez wrote, Rosario was stubborn in her desire for freedom: “She went about her duties wishing and watching for a good chance to free herself and go back to her own people.”

One day, Vásquez wrote, Martínez pondered how he might make Rosario feel more comfortable. It dawned on him, as though he had never considered the possibility before, that she “was perhaps lonesome for her little girl.” He brought Rosario to the home of the family that owned Soledad. According to Vásquez, Rosario’s knees shook as she stood at their doorstep. Martínez and Soledad’s owners talked about the weather, the year’s crops, and sheep, before he told them that the purpose of his visit was to “reunite Rosario with her little girl.” In Vásquez’s account, Soledad’s owners suggested that they let Soledad choose where she would live; believing the girl was happy, they thought she would stay with them. But, after Soledad entered the room, she “flew to her mother’s arms and clung fast,” Vásquez wrote. Martínez arranged to purchase Soledad for another hundred and fifty pesos.

Estevan Rael-Gálvez, the president and C.E.O. of Native Bound Unbound, a digital archive that aspires to recover every documented case of Indigenous slavery in the Americas, has described “Enchanted Temples of Taos” as “one of the first modern accounts that uses the term ‘slave,’ and not the euphemisms” often deployed to obscure the reality of Indigenous slavery. But he has also characterized the narrative as “more romanticized than real.” According to Vásquez, a few years after Father Martínez purchased Rosario, he informed her that “she was a free woman.” He showed her a picture of President Abraham Lincoln and told her about the Emancipation Proclamation. “It will not be necessary for you to run away now, Rosario,” he said in Vásquez’s account. “If you wish to go back to your own people, you may do so.” Rael-Gálvez, however, found evidence that Father Martínez petitioned the Taos County probate court, in January, 1867, to not recognize her absolute freedom. Almost two years after the end of the Civil War, he persuaded the court to deem her a maidservant, and to name him as her guardian. For Vásquez, the end of the Civil War marked a bright line between Rosario’s enslavement and freedom. For her and for many other enslaved Indigenous people, though, it was more like a transition from one form of captivity to another.

When Father Martínez died, in July, 1867, Rosario went to live with his son George Romero and Romero’s wife. The following year, the United States sent a federal agent named William W. Griffin to New Mexico to investigate claims that slavery was still rampant in the territory. Griffin submitted four hundred and thirty-five indictments to a federal grand jury, including one, Rael-Gálvez discovered, of Romero. (None made it to trial, owing to insufficient evidence.) In the 1870 and 1880 censuses, Rosario was still listed as a servant in Romero’s household. In the 1885 territorial census, Soledad and her five-year-old daughter, Cleotilde, were listed as servants in the household of Romero’s brother. There is no evidence that Rosario was ever paid for her labor. By the time Dora Ortiz Vásquez was born, in 1907, Rosario had her own home, in Ocate, on the other side of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains from Taos. Though elderly, she still walked great distances to visit Dora and her mother. Dora loved Rosario “as a grandma,” she wrote, and affectionately called her “Ma-Ya-Yo.” Rosario died in 1930. Soledad had died in 1927. Dora wrote that it pained Rosario to have outlived her daughter.

Rosario’s story is one small piece of the history of Indigenous slavery. After the conquest, Spaniards brought thousands of Native Americans back to Spain, their faces branded with marks of the Spanish crown, their owner’s name, or terms signifying their status. The Spanish owners of mines in the Americas chained Indigenous slaves together and sent them deep into shafts where they performed the most dangerous aspects of the work. In 1542, the Spanish missionary Bartólome de las Casas completed “A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies,” which chronicled the devastation of Indigenous communities at the hands of Spanish conquistadors. Portions of his text circulated at the Spanish court and influenced King Charles V to issue the Spanish New Laws, which made the enslavement of Indians illegal, except for those who were said to be cannibals or who were captured in a “just war.” In documents produced before 1542, it was common to find references to “esclavos indios” or “esclavas indias.” Afterward, those who held Indian captives developed a new language for describing the nature of their property. They were encomendados or repartidos (indentured laborers), sirvientes or criados (servants), or genízaros or panis (ethnic labels indicating mixed-race or Indigenous identities). Andrés Reséndez, a historian at the University of California, Davis, has written, “Although these forms of labor are impossible to fit into a simple definition, they generally shared four traits that made them akin to enslavement: forcible removal of the victims from one place to another, inability to leave the workplace, violence or threat of violence to compel them to work, and nominal or no pay.”

The sheer variety of terms for enslaved Indians, each of which could imply different circumstances of labor and captivity, has led to debates about whether their various conditions should be called slavery at all. Some scholars of both Indigenous and African American history are more comfortable with different words, such as “captives.” But, as Rael-Gálvez explained to me, even the twenty to thirty enslaved Africans who landed in Virginia in 1619 aboard a vessel named the White Lion weren’t called slaves. “Because Virginia had no law at the time that defined chattel slavery, contemporary records defined them as unfree laborers whose status was akin to indentured servants,” Rael-Gálvez said. Yet that has not prevented us from seeing their arrival in the Americas as a pivotal moment in the history of African slavery. To Rael-Gálvez, the fact that enslaved Africans called laborers or servants are nevertheless regarded today as central to the history of slavery suggests that we can’t dismiss Indians described by the same terms.

In many cases, Indigenous enslavement adds new dimensions to familiar histories of the Americas—and to some of their most famous actors. Christopher Columbus sold hundreds of Indians into slavery in Europe. Hernán Cortés owned hundreds of enslaved Indigenous people, more than anyone else in Mexico. The Pueblo Revolt, in 1680, during which Indians destroyed missions and churches and renounced their baptisms and Christian marriages, was a rebellion against the widespread enslavement of Pueblo Indians as much as it was a rejection of the Catholic Church. Tituba, one of the first women accused of being a witch in Salem, Massachusetts, was described by nineteenth-century chroniclers as a Black woman. Historians today, based on their readings of seventeenth-century documents, believe that she was an enslaved Indigenous woman from the Caribbean or South America. For Rael-Gálvez and other scholars, Indigenous slavery expands our understanding of the history of human bondage—who its victims were, where it took place, what it looked like, and when it ended.

Native Bound Unbound grew out of more than three decades of research by Rael-Gálvez into the history of Indigenous slavery. As a Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan, he created a database of thousands of Indigenous slaves held in Colorado and New Mexico. By the time he graduated, in 2002, he had begun a job as the state historian of New Mexico. Then, in 2009, he became the executive director of the National Hispanic Cultural Center, in Albuquerque. In 2022, he began the Native Bound Unbound project, with a grant from the Mellon Foundation that allowed him to hire a team of students, professors, genealogists, and archivists to search for records of enslavement across the Americas. Researchers have since collected an abundance of materials which have revealed traces of the lives of enslaved Indians. They’ve dug deeply in some places, but not at all in others. “We have only just begun work that will extend across generations,” Rael-Gálvez told me.

The establishment of Native Bound Unbound coincided with a boom in scholarship on Indigenous slavery, much of which has focussed on specific regions in Latin America and the United States. An exception was Reséndez’s 2016 book, “The Other Slavery,” which took a more panoramic view of Indigenous slavery, from before the Spanish conquest up to the early twentieth century. “The Other Slavery” aimed to increase awareness of Native American slavery in the same way that Native Bound Unbound aspires to do. And yet, as Philip Deloria, a historian at Harvard, recently said on the podcast “Native America Calling,” “It’s been very hard to think about the ways that we can expand the narrative of Indigenous enslavement. . . . I can list off four or five or six really good books—academic books—on Indigenous enslavement that don’t seem to have made any difference in terms of the way that we think about the narrative.”

Deloria explained, “When we talk about slavery, we think about white columns, plantations in the Southeast, and African American slavery.” In fact, when African and Indigenous slavery are viewed together, it is easy to see how intertwined they are. The researchers at Native Bound Unbound have uncovered instances of African and Indigenous slaves in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries working side by side in Latin American mines. Micaela Wiehe, a Native Bound Unbound researcher and Ph.D. student at Penn State, found marriage records from the sixteenth century, in and around Mexico City, which show unions between enslaved Indians and enslaved Africans. Boston newspapers in the early nineteenth century announced the escape of Indigenous slaves alongside African slaves. The Native Bound Unbound research team learned of a Black-presenting Choctaw man named Spence Johnson, who was captured in Oklahoma and taken to Shreveport, Louisiana, where he was sold into slavery. He was freed after the Civil War, and spent the rest of his life in Waco, Texas. Julio Rojas Rodríguez, a doctoral candidate at El Colegio de México, who works for Native Bound Unbound and teaches history at the Cambridge School in Dallas, told me about a Cuban slave trader named Francisco Martí y Torrens who led expeditions to Africa and Mexico, where he purchased slaves and abducted previously free people to work on Cuba’s sugar plantations. To Rojas Rodríguez, figures such as Martí demonstrate how African and Indigenous enslavement “are part of the same big story—the story of slavery, the slave trade, and the replacement of slavery by new forms of coercive labor.”

Tiya Miles, a historian at Harvard University, has written several books that are a testament to the entanglements between African and Indigenous enslavement. “Ties That Bind,” published in 2005, was about a Cherokee man named Shoeboots who owned an African woman named Doll. “The Dawn of Detroit,” published in 2017, showed how colonial Detroit relied on various systems of unfree labor performed by both enslaved Africans and Indigenous captives. “Many of us are used to thinking in certain lanes,” Miles said. “We get into these ruts with our thinking, and one of these ruts is Black slavery. And when I say ‘Black slavery,’ it’s, like, click, check. We get it. We see the cotton fields in our minds immediately. And if I said something like ‘Cherokee removal,’ or ‘Trail of Tears,’ or even ‘Indian Wars,’ it would probably function the same way. For Native people, it’s about removal, land theft, land loss. And for Black people, it’s about being in chains. That’s not even an accurate picture of all the different multifaceted ways that slavery played out, but it’s what people see.” Miles also told me that, for African American historians, “the subject of slavery is very tender. We are descendants of enslaved people, so when we write about the history of slavery we are its caretakers as well as the examiners and scholars of that history.”

In 2021, Miles participated in a four-day virtual conference convened by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, called “The Other Slavery: Histories of Indian Bondage from New Spain to the Southwestern United States.” On a panel with Reséndez, she confessed that when she first read his book, she felt “a little bit resistant. I had a question about, Are all these things really slavery? And, if we’re going to call all of these things slavery, what does that do to African American slavery?” She went on to say, “I’m of the mind that it is O.K. for us to use the term slavery flexibly. Slavery does not have to denote one particular place or group of people or experience. Maybe what we need is better language.”

Some scholars have highlighted differences between African and Indigenous slavery, noting that African enslavement was based on systems of chattel, racial hierarchies, inherited status, and forced agricultural and domestic-labor regimes, whereas Indian enslavement could be based on kinship and diplomacy. (Many Indigenous slaves were captured as prisoners of war by both Europeans and other Indigenous groups.) There may be some broad truth to these distinctions, but Rael-Gálvez has argued that enslaved Africans and Indians in different times and places endured all of these experiences, and that one system of slavery shouldn’t be seen as “more or less” like slavery than another. Doug Kiel, my colleague at Northwestern and a historian of Native America, told me that some Indigenous peoples have also been reluctant to address past slavery within their own communities. “The story of tribal sovereignty almost always prevails over a frank analysis of violence,” he said.

Scholars who’ve conceived of slavery as an experience that cuts across groups have shaped Rael-Gálvez’s thinking about Native Bound Unbound. In 1982, the Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson published his seminal work, “Slavery and Social Death,” which argued that all forms of slavery shared certain characteristics, including that enslaved people had been stolen from their family or community, were unable to determine the conditions of their labor, and had, at best, uncertain prospects for freedom. Rael-Gálvez told me that the Native Bound Unbound team applies the same criteria when determining whether to label cases as instances of slavery. Beyond Patterson’s definition, Rael-Gálvez specifies that individuals must be classified in documents by one of several “terms of enslavement”—esclavo, criado, encomendado, or genízaro. Sometimes, individuals’ Indigenous identity might be more ambiguous, such as when they’re described by reference to different caste categories, or as hijos de la iglesia (children of the church), or “padres no conocidos” (of unknown parentage). “In those gray areas, we move carefully,” he said. The researchers may flag the document, set it aside, and hope that they will someday discover more evidence about the same person. In those cases, Rael-Gálvez said, “It’s not about denying exploitation, but about refusing to overclaim where the evidence is incomplete.”

One inevitable question about Native Bound Unbound’s research is how many Indigenous slaves there were. Brett Rushforth, a historian at the Huntington Library who has written about Indigenous slavery, told me that, in the case of African American slavery, before the publication of Philip D. Curtin’s seminal work, “The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census,” in 1969, “apologists for slavery argued that Northern abolitionists had exaggerated its scale because they were anti-Southern.” But their argument became harder to sustain after Curtin estimated that some ten million Africans were brought to the Americas. (The number has since been revised, to about twelve million individuals forcibly transported across the Atlantic, some ten and a half million of whom survived, plus another fifteen to twenty million born into slavery in the Americas.) Rushforth argued that a count of the number of enslaved Indians is important for the same reason: “It lets people know that they need to take it seriously,” he said.

In Rushforth’s book “Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France,” published in 2012, he estimated that there were between two million and four million Indigenous slaves in the Americas from the late-fifteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. In “The Other Slavery,” published two years later, Reséndez estimated between two and a half and five million over roughly the same period, having identified additional Spanish-language sources. Both have consulted with Rael-Gálvez, who has said that it could take decades for Native Bound Unbound researchers to come up with a rough tally. Rushforth doubts a definitive number can ever be determined, because records have been destroyed and because the language and methods of Indigenous slavery were designed to keep it hidden. “For now,” Rael-Gálvez told me, “the most accurate way to convey the scale is to emphasize that Indigenous enslavement was vast, hemispheric, and profoundly underdocumented.”

In thinking about the significance of counting enslaved Indians, Rael-Gálvez has drawn inspiration from the New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie’s 2022 essay “We Still Can’t See American Slavery for What It Was.” In it, Bouie thinks through the meanings and ethical dilemmas of SlaveVoyages, a digital repository of data about the vessels that brought enslaved Africans to the New World and then transported them within the Americas. Its African Origins database contains information about almost a hundred thousand individuals. Bouie acknowledges that SlaveVoyages was an important resource for historians and descendants. But he also argues that it raises ethical questions: “How exactly do we relate to data that allows someone—anyone—to identify a specific enslaved person? How do we wield these powerful tools for quantitative analysis without abstracting the human reality away from the story?”

“Seeing Bouie’s questions felt affirming,” Rael-Gálvez told me. “It reinforced why we were committed from the outset to resisting abstraction, to moving slowly, and to treating each recovered name and experience as belonging to a person with a life worth remembering.” Details of the experiences of enslaved individuals appear in official documents only rarely, and usually only briefly and incompletely. Native Bound Unbound, the project’s website reads, tries to “respectfully trace the arc of their lives, from captivity, through enslavement, to freedom”—to reconstruct the context of enslavement, connect individuals within broader kin networks, and help descendants learn about their ancestors.

For Rael-Gálvez, Native Bound Unbound is deeply personal. When I talked with him, he described Colorado’s and New Mexico’s San Luis Valley, where he was born and raised, as defined by the “persistence of Indigenous presence, memory, and belonging.” When he was growing up, he recalled, his dad’s grandmother often told the story of a relative, “a woman who had been captured by an enemy tribe. She referred to her as la india panana.” Rael-Gálvez later learned that panana means Pawnee. While doing research for his dissertation, he discovered several other Indigenous ancestors who had been enslaved: a woman called Doña Inez, who was captured in 1590 and became one of the first enslaved Pueblo Indians; a woman referred to as “la apacha Margarita” and listed as a member of the household of Cristobal Arellano, who came to New Mexico in 1695; Josefa Arellano, whom Rael-Gálvez believes to be Margarita’s daughter, referred to in historical records as “india” and “coyota,” classifications reserved during the Spanish colonial period for the child of an enslaved Indigenous woman; and Antonia, an ancestor on his mother’s side, referred to in the 1750 census of Santa Fe as an “India” living, Rael-Gálvez told me, “in the household of a man who a few years earlier had bought a house for fifty pesos and ‘an Indian woman.’ ” In a 2025 essay about his ancestor, Rael-Gálvez wrote, “I recall losing my breath when I laid eyes upon the document with Antonia’s name, a record created almost three centuries ago in the same place where I am writing from today.”

Several of the researchers working with him also descended from enslaved Indians. Before meeting Rael-Gálvez, Daria Celeste Landress had learned while researching her family history that three Indigenous ancestors had been listed in historical documents as chattel, alongside furniture, houses, and trees. Aaron Taylor signed on to work for Native Bound Unbound knowing nothing about the enslaved Indians in his family tree. He had grown up with family stories about his French ancestors. One of them had moved to New Mexico in the late seventeenth century and married a prominent Hispanic woman named Elena Gallegos. Taylor learned that, when Gallegos died, she left an Indigenous servant named Rosa to her son, who had children with Rosa and granted her freedom when he died. Taylor is a direct descendant of Rosa. “It was a perspective-altering change in the family history,” Taylor told me.

Novella Nied, now in her eighties, is Rosario’s great-great-granddaughter and Soledad’s great-granddaughter. She returned to her childhood home town of Taos in 2001, after decades working in the Foreign Service, because Taos, she once explained, “is where my roots are.” When Nied was young, her father told her that her great-great-grandmother was Indian. In 1972, when she was in her thirties, he took the family camping in Chaco Canyon, because Rosario had told her descendants that that was where she came from. Nied received “Enchanted Temples of Taos” as a Christmas gift in 1975, the year it was published. Dora had visited the family to give them copies of her book.

Nied recalled in an e-mail that she was “surprised to learn that Rosario (and Soledad) lived and worked as slaves in the Martínez household.” Dora Ortiz Vásquez also wrote that her great-grandfather considered Rosario to be a member of his household and had left her a small piece of land in his will; Nied began to wonder if he had “a more familial relationship with Rosario.” (Native American and African American historians have demonstrated that enslaved people could be part of a household, even part of a family, and still be enslaved.)

Visiting the Martínez home, which is now a museum, has raised other questions. During one visit decades ago, Nied told me, she saw a picture of Rosario pinned to a wall. Vásquez had included it in “Enchanted Temples of Taos,” and it had Rosario’s Navajo name, Ated-bah-Hohzoni, scribbled on it. In the picture, Rosario is sitting in front of a cracked adobe wall, in an ornate wooden chair, wearing a dark dress, with her hands clasped over a dark shawl. Her white hair and wrinkled skin suggest she’s in her later years. When Nied visited a second time, a few years later, the photograph of Rosario was no longer there. She asked museum workers if they knew anything about the image, or about Rosario and Soledad. They did not. On a third visit, a few years ago, she said, she spoke with the museum’s new director, Daniel Barela, who also told her that he didn’t have any information about the photo. (Barela said to me that he didn’t remember meeting Nied, and confirmed that he didn’t know anything about Rosario or the photo.)

According to “Enchanted Temples of Taos,” Rosario had forgotten the Navajo language, except for a lullaby, by the end of her life. She had also come to think of herself as Spanish as much as Navajo. Vásquez recalled that, as a child, she would meet Rosario in the middle of a field, where they would sit and talk, and Rosario would relate stories from earlier years. “The Americanos,” Rosario said, “of course they gave me my freedom, but not when I wanted it.” ♦

Finishing School is a column in which Mary Norris, The New Yorker’s Comma Queen, asks the eternal questions—What’s that you’re shredding? Can a person be cool and old-fashioned at the same time? Is it O.K. to have a “Moby-Dick” T-shirt for every day of the week?—and does her best to behave under increasingly alarming circumstances.

I don’t know how it came to this, but I have an extensive wardrobe of Melville T-shirts. Most of them are mementos of marathon readings of “Moby-Dick” in Sag Harbor; one was a gift from a friend in the Hudson Valley—“You should have this,” she said, handing it over. The ur-shirt is an XXL “Call Me Ishmael” number from Arrowhead, the house in the Berkshires where Melville wrote “Moby-Dick.” That’s the one I was wearing the day I met Bernard on the boardwalk in Rockaway.

It was early September, and I was approaching the boardwalk along a ramp I hardly ever use, when a guy in front of me turned to adjust one leg of his shorts, which was twisted and riding up. He gave me a radiant smile. “I like your shirt,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said. I had forgotten I was wearing it. “I’m a big Melville fan.”

“So am I,” he said. We stopped on the boardwalk to parley—two strangers who happened to be prowling the peninsula on a Thursday afternoon. He said that he owned a bookstore in Greenpoint and hosted meetings of the Moby-Dick Club. The store was having its first anniversary party on Halloween, and I was invited.

“What’s the name of the store?” I queried. When I couldn’t make sense of his answer, he asked, “Are you on Instagram? Send me a message—I’ll know it’s you.” And he spelled out “Clown Show Prison.”

This year marks the hundred-and-seventy-fifth anniversary, or demisemiseptcentennial, of “Moby-Dick,” originally published in 1851 (saving you the math), but the year leading up to it set a high-water mark for Melville tributes. In the spring of 2025, “Moby-Dick” opened at the Metropolitan Opera. Many audience members sported nautical accessories—scrimshaw earrings, boat shoes—in much the same way that young girls wore pink to the “Barbie” movie. We spotted one another in the bars around Lincoln Center before the show. I had chosen my Queequeg shirt, featuring a purple tattoo on a soft-gray ground, representing the face of a South Sea islander.

Then, in midsummer, I met Donovan Hohn, the author of “Moby-Duck,” a nonfiction book about tens of thousands of rubber ducks that fell off a container ship, in 1992, and were later found floating all over the globe. We arranged to rendezvous at a Starbucks near East Twenty-sixth Street, where the author/customs agent lived in quiet desperation after the failure of his whaling novel, and drive up to Woodlawn Cemetery, in the Bronx, to visit Melville’s grave. The car was a 2012 Fiat 500, white like the whale, with a transmission that had developed the unfortunate habit of popping out of third gear. I hoped it would not get stove in on the Mosholu.

Melville rests in the Catalpa section, under a big square block of stone:

(Punctuation the engraver’s.) Most of the surface of the stone is devoted to an empty scroll—a tabula rasa. Admirers have left an assortment of pens and pencils on top, as if to help the writer overcome his fear of the blank white page. I contributed a Blackwing stub that I found in the glove compartment. Donovan and I took each other’s picture to document the occasion. I was wearing my most daring T-shirt—turquoise, with the Leviathan rippling across my chest—but at the last minute I slipped behind the monument, suddenly aware that whale apparel can invite unflattering comparisons.

On Halloween, I went on foot from Long Island City to Greenpoint via the Pulaski Bridge, to surprise Bernard in his bookstore. Greenpoint could have been Nantucket, with a torch burning outside the local inn. Three blocks in from the East River, Manhattan Avenue was bustling with trick-or-treaters—dinosaurs and Grim Reapers, celebrity chefs, Big Bananas from “Spongebob.” My costume was a sou’wester and a pea jacket over several Melville T-shirts. The original plan was to peel them off at the party, one by one, in a sort of merch striptease, except that on the way to Brooklyn I got cold and dispensed with the idea of a performance—wasn’t it enough just to show up?

On Freeman Street, I fetched up outside a curious storefront with a horned animal skull and various plants out front: Clown Show Prison. People were getting the shop ready for the party. Bernard was in the rafters, hoisting up a painting that nobody liked. He climbed down to talk, and I asked him something I had been wondering about ever since our chance encounter on the boardwalk: What is the significance of the name Clown Show Prison?

He explained that he and his crew—partners in the bookstore as well as roommates—were walking around the Lower East Side one day when they were invited to a show in progress and lured into a basement where students at a clown school were taking their final exam, trying to elicit laughter from a captive audience. It was painful. “We felt like we couldn’t leave,” Bernard said. When they got out, they referred to the experience as Clown Show Prison and thought of it when they needed a name for the store.

I bought a book, of course—there is no getting out of Clown Show Prison without buying a book—and then, on an impulse, I unpacked the only Melville T-shirt I was not already wearing and thrust it at Bernard. It was the single most unflattering item of clothing I owned: when donned, a tondo portrait of the bearded Melville fell directly over my paunch. I’d seen myself in it in a group photo and knew I would never wear it in public again. In fact, I fell out with the friend who sent me the photo. I could, however, do housework in it, and I happened to be wearing it while vacuuming on the morning of January 6, 2021, when I bore witness, via live TV, to the insurrection at the Capitol, a shocking act of treason that I still can’t believe happened, even though fresh shocks are administered daily.

“For me?” Bernard said. He couldn’t see that the shirt was cursed with conflict and cross-stitched with terror, but we both noticed that it was several sizes too large for him. Maybe he could use it as a flag.

Only now does it occur to me that Clown Show Prison is not just a good name for a bookstore but also the perfect metaphor for life under the current Administration. ♦